Web.com Website Builder Review

When it comes to building your passion, you deserve a dedicated team. Our one-stop site builder provides you with all the tools and services you need to make your unique ideas shine.

Web.com

Web.com is a great name, but it could be better known for its website builder features. If you want to quickly create a site or online store, Web.com’s intuitive builder is more than up to the task. The web hosting portion remains a mixed bag, but the service is counterbalanced by good shared hosting plans, strong phone support (24/7 live chat), numerous themes, and excellent uptime.

Niche website builders can reach a broader audience by combining their product with an existing web hosting service, and that’s exactly what Web.com has done. The service is still a mixed bag, but it offers excellent shared hosting packages and features like one-click WordPress installation. If you’re looking to create an ecommerce website quickly without investing in your own domain name, Web.com is worth considering.

Prices, Plans, and Options

Web.com’s prices are a bit higher than other website builders. However, the Web.com Pricing page is clear and upfront about all fees and costs. You start with a $1.95-per-month personal website builder and add options from there by subscribing to higher plans. The only one available for $10 per month is Website Essentials, which comes with 150 templates and thousands of stock images. Additional plans include Business Essentials for $15 per month, Ecommerce Essentials for $26 per month, and Ecommerce Premium for $40 per month.

Those are the standard plans, but Web.com offers other add-ons features, too. Starting at $9.99 per month, the WordPress website building plans let you combine Web.com tools with the popular content management system. Opt for a more expensive plan to gain more storage, more email boxes, and more WordPress sites to manage. Hire web design and SEO experts to build your site for you.

To safeguard your site, Web.com offers spam protection via CatchGuard, as well as email virus protection and removal. You can get a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate starting at $28 per year, which should be considered an essential purchase if you plan to sell products. Note, however, that Gator (HostGator’s website builder) offers a free SSL certificate with some of its plans. For $50 per year, the Cyber Security Solution package includes more benefits, such as 24/7 assistance, device and identity monitoring, and a mobile VPN client. 

Site Tools and E-Commerce Options

Web.com makes it easy for anyone to start building a website. During the setup process, you can enter basic information, such as whether your site is personal or for a specialized business, and let Web.com generate the site from there. Or you can choose from dozens of stylish templates as your starting point. The templates include sites for car dealerships, coffee shops, jewelry makers, and repair services. Browsing through the library also shows the available stock art. Once you pick your theme, you’re locked into it, which is a common restriction with website builders. However, starting over with a new site is quick and easy, too, as is undoing minor mistakes.

In your dashboard, you can access and edit all the sites you’ve created, along with any uploaded files associated with those sites. The analytics section displays useful stats, such as page views, unique visitors, popular pages, and what devices visitors use to access your site. Web.com integrates with Google Analytics to deliver deep audience insights.  

The site building interface itself is pleasingly straightforward. You can create a single-page site, or opt for multiple pages and nestle them inside each other to make menus for users to navigate. Switch between device layouts at any time to see how your site looks on a laptop versus a phone. The home page for our bakery test website features an About Us section, a Contact page, and, of course, the Store page. Under advanced settings, you enable more specialized types of pages, such as your legal page, various error pages, and a blog. Here you can also integrate your social media accounts for Instagram, Pinterest, and Disqus comments. 

The e-commerce tools have their own section within the interface. There, you can enter up to 500 products (unlimited products in higher tiers), including a mix of physical and digital goods. A customer service rep said you can theoretically sell subscriptions, but there’s no way to, say, lock off a portion of your site to paid members the way Wix lets you. You can offer discounts, though. You can also perform organizational tasks like monitoring orders, entering tax information, and making sure shipping between customers and warehouses stays on track. The eCommerce Essentials tier includes Facebook marketplace integration.

Once all your content is in place, make them look their best with Web.com’s editing tools. Edit individual style elements like fonts and buttons, or change the entire theme to literally give your site a fresh coat of paint. Click the big Build button to pull up a list of site features to drag and drop directly to the page, from icons and image galleries to share buttons and text forms. Embedding a YouTube video that plays on loop as your site’s background looks especially dynamic. You can even write and embed your own code. 

Shared Hosting

When you purchase a Web.com site builder plan, you also receive a free domain and hosting. However, Web.com still sells three tiers of Linux- or Windows-based shared hosting: Basic Hosting, Plus Hosting, and Premium Hosting. Each includes a website builder, unlimited monthly data transfers, access to open-source applications, site backup, and a one-year domain registration. The plans’ feature sets differ in other areas, however.

For example, Essential Hosting (starting at $9.99 per month) includes 10GB of web storage, 25 FTP accounts, and support for one website. Plus (starting at $13.99 per month) ups the specs to 20GB of web storage, 50 FTP accounts, and support for five websites. Premium Hosting (starting at $16.99 per month) stands at the top of the hill with 40GB of web storage, unlimited FTP accounts, and support for ten websites. As with the site builder plans, these prices are a bit higher than before.

Those are decent shared hosting plans, but they can’t touch the excellent offerings from HostGator. This Editors’ Choice pick for shared hosting has varied and powerful packages that include Linux- or Windows-based servers, as well as unlimited storage, monthly data transfers, and email addresses across all plans.

Sadly, Web.com isn’t the web host to turn to if you wish to sign up for anything more than shared hosting. The service lacks cloud, dedicated, and VPS hosting plans. In fact, a Web.com customer service rep suggested that people should take a gander at Network Solutions, the company’s sister site, for those types of hosting plans. Check out the various linked roundups to view our other recommendations in each category.

Excellent Uptime and Customer Support

Website uptime is one of the most important aspects of a hosting service. While your site is down, clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services—and they might not come back.

To test this, we used a website monitoring tool to track the uptime of our Web.com-hosted test site. Every 15 minutes, the tool pings our website and sends us an email if it is unable to contact the site for longer than one minute. We looked at the data for the most recent 14 days for each site’s review. In our latest tests, Web.com didn’t go down once, a noticeable improvement since our last look a few years ago. 

Web.com’s customer service is similarly reliable. We called the 24/7 customer service on a weekday evening for an explainer regarding Web.com’s shared web hosting plan. In just a few seconds, a person transferred us to the relevant department. Soon after that, we chatted with a helpful representative who gave us a thorough explanation of Web.com’s shared hosting plans. That same person stated that we should visit Network Solutions for higher-tier plans.

Segments of this review taken from pcmag.com Read More at PCMAG.com